


And if they die upon my tongue

by meglin



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 19:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/890984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meglin/pseuds/meglin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Processing is next to impossible while you're dying. Set during the Season 2 finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And if they die upon my tongue

It’s weird, looking back, the fact that they've never talked about the future. Their future. Not once. They've never mentioned it in abstract or planned out the specifics. Nothing. Not even in those few, awful months that Lydia decided that the best way to get back at her parents was taking home ec and making plans to be a housewife. She still never even asked him if they were forever.

It was probably for the best, he’d never have agreed. He couldn’t. Can’t. Can’t even say I love you. The words die on his lips, spun out like dandelion fluff, dry like water droplets. Whatever sort of metaphor Lydia was stuck on.

He never realized that he knows. He’s always known about her latest kick. The scheme she’d hatched to save them both, to lift them out of this town and on to bigger things, better things. Because no matter what else there was in their lives, there was always that. No matter what she pulled to keep them on top of the isolated wasteland that is high school, her eyes were always set on getting out of there.

And it was always them. She never mentioned it. Never once brought it up or thought to ask him, but he was always in her plans. He never noticed that he knew that either. Not ‘til after.

But then he knows a lot more now than he ever did before.

He knows what drowning feels like. Drowning in guilt, drowning in thought. Just plain drowning. He’s felt inferior, felt the walls separating him from mediocrity, the walls that keep him sane. He knows they’re paper-thin, knows how they crumble, he knows how hard he needs to work to keep them up. How hard Lydia works too.

He knows what it feels like when they fall. When he falls. Falling in love (at least he knows it now), falling to pieces, dying is falling too, right?

He knows what it feels like to die. He’s done it three times after all.

And yet, through everything, he still doesn’t know how I love you tastes. He knows the sound, in Lydia’s voice or his Parents’. Knows how it feels in his throat. Or the sound of the words, choked and painful as they suffocate, as if there’s a wall in his throat, a barricade that’d stop him even if he wanted to say it.

A barricade that’s saving him even as it smothers him. Or it used to, before he realized how little it fooled anyone. Anyone who matters anyway. Lydia.

He’s strung out on that realization, his skin stretched too thin, bones collapsing in without the walls to hold them up.

Or maybe that’s just that he’s dying, this cycle of revelations a prelude to an afterlife where he’ll be made to see, over and over again, the ways in which he wasn’t good enough. He knows it already, but thinking about Lydia helps him forget.

If he thinks about it he can feel the claws in his stomach, too bright spots of pain that block out everything. That’s almost better, the easiness of overstimulation when compared to the senseless drone of his thoughts as they break against the inside of his skull.

But then even that luxury is gone, the pain slipping out of him like water out of his hands. It seems like a signal, first numbness, then blinding light. Only step 2 never happens. Instead he drifts, a leaf on the face of a stream, back down into his body, and he’s alive.

Everything’s too bright and too muddy at once, mixed with the blurry clarity you get when you’ve just woken up. It feels like real life and the only thing Jackson can think about, for those first few precious seconds, is Lydia.


End file.
